LB 875 
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Copy 1 



J. L. M. CURRY 



AN ADDRESS BY 



EDWIN ANDERSON ALDERMAN 



A. D. 1903 



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J. L. M. CURRY 



an Address by 
Edwin Anderson Alderman 



a. D. 1903 







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3 



J. L. M. CURRY, D. C. L., LL. D. 

A MEMORIAL ADDRESS 

By Edwin Anderson Alderman, LL. D., 

President of the Tulane University, of New Orleans, La., delivered at Rich- 
mond, Virginia, April 26, 1903, under the auspices of 

The Conference for Education in the South. 



It is altogether proper and beautiful that this 
great Conference, after a session of singular in- 
terest and meaning, should come together, in its 
closing hours, to do honor to the memory of a 
man who helped to form and direct its history, 
and who stood for its highest ideals; and like- 
wise to gain from a study of his purposeful life, 
fresh strength and will for the work that lies be- 
fore us, and will lie before those who are to come 
after us. Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, who 
passed out of this life on February 12, 1903, lived 
a long, full, varied life of service, of devotion, of 
struggle and achievement. We mourn, therefore, 
no young Lycidas, dead ere his prime, but we 
come, rather, to take to heart the lesson of the 
life of a splendid Ulysses, who had never known 
rest from travel and work, who had drunk hon- 
orable life to its lees, and whose spirit at the last 



still yearned in desire "to strive, to seek, to find, 
and not to yield." J. L. M. Curry had been a 
soldier in two wars, a maker of laws in a state 
and nation, a preacher, a writer of useful books, 
twice the representative of his government at the 
court of Spain, and a statesman of that truest 
sort whose faith in the perfectibility of men was 
unfailing and whose ambition was to give to all 
men a chance to inherit the beauty, the richness 
and power of life. 

Dr. Curry was born in Lincoln County, 
Georgia, on June 5, 1825. During his early 
childhood, his father, a wealthy planter, emi- 
grated from Georgia to Alabama, and settled 
about six miles from Talladega in that State. 
His academic training was received at the Uni- 
versity of Georgia and his legal education at 
Harvard College, from which he was graduated 
in 1846 at the age of twenty-one. In 1847, he 
was elected to the Legislature of Alabama from 
Talladega County and began his great career as 
a public servant. For twenty years he served 
the State of Alabama with singular ability and 
distinction, as legislator, congressman, soldier and 
teacher, and though his later life was passed 
elsewhere, and his services belonged to the 
nation, his heart and mind constantly reverted 
with tender loyalty to that great state, as the 
land of his young manhood and his home. 

The intense, rich life of our leader and friend 
covered an equally intense and rich period of his 



country's history. His thoughtful boyhood looked 
out upon a crude, healthy, boastful nation, drunk 
with a kind of democratic passion, and getting 
used, in rough ways, to the shrewd air of popular 
government, and yet clinging to the concept of 
orderly nationality. His young manhood was 
passed in the isolated lower South, amid the 
storm of a great argument, as to the nature of 
this Union, made necessary by the silence and 
indecision of the Constitution. To our minds, 
cleared of the hot temper of the time, that age 
seems an unhappy, contentious, groping age ; 
but I believe that it was a good age in which to 
be born, for men were in earnest about deep, 
vital things. It was indeed an age of passion, 
but of passion based on principles, and enthusi- 
asms, and deep loyalties. The cynic, the political 
idler, the self-seeker, fled before these fiery-eyed 
men who were probing into metaphysical, gov- 
ernmental theories and constitutional interpreta- 
tions, and who counted their ideas as of more 
value than their lives. The time had its obvious 
faults, and was doomed to fall before the avatar 
of progress ; but there lived in it beauty and 
force and a great central note of exaltation of 
personality above social progress. To this was 
due the romantic beauty of many of the person- 
alities of this period and section, and also the 
industrial inefficiency of the total mass. Around 
the fireside, in that frontier world of his, the talk 
did not fall so much upon the kind of man who 



forms the syndicate or corners the stock market 
or who wages the warfare of trade around the 
world, but rather upon simple, old questions 
which might have been asked in the Homeric 
age: Is he free from sordidness or stain? Has 
he borne himself bravely in battle ? Has he suf- 
fered somewhere with courage and dignity ? Has 
he kept faith with ideals? 

The best and most lasting bequest of the time 
to the whole nation was the conception of poli- 
tics as a lofty profession, to be entered upon by 
the best men for unselfish purposes. The old 
South sent her greatest, truest men to represent 
her in national councils. The new South has 
sent unpurchasable men at least. I believe that 
the whole nation has been taught a lesson by 
this custom which will prove an unceasing good 
in this great democratic experiment of ours. Dr. 
Curry had reached his prime when the great 
drama, fate determined and fate driven, passed 
from argument into war, and he, himself, caught 
in the grip of that same fate, with all his gentle- 
ness and tenderness, became of those whose 
"faith and truth on war's red touchstone rang 
true metal." In the strength of middle life and 
in the serene wisdom of old age, this fortunate 
man found himself living in another world, and 
with sufficient strength of heart, which is courage, 
to live in it and of it and for it with a spirit un- 
spoiled by hate or bitter memories, with a heart 
unfretted by regrets and with a purpose unshaken 



by any doubt. A great soul is needed to pass 
from one era to another in such fashion as this. 
The strand of every revolutionary epoch is lined 
with the wrecks of pure and lovable men who 
had not the faith and courage to will to live and 
serve another time. Dr. Curry possessed this 
quality of courage in high degree. Indeed, for 
the first time he had sight of the possibility of an 
undivided country, rid of sectionalism and pro- 
vincialism and hindering custom and tradition, 
conscious of its destiny, assured of its nationality, 
striving to fit itself for the work of a great 
nation in civilization. He had sight, too, of 
his own section, idealized, to him, by fortitude 
and woe, adjusting itself in dignity and suffer- 
ing and power to the spirit of the modern world. 
What is there for a strong man to do? — we 
may fancy himself asking himself in the silence 
of his soul. There could be no bickerings for 
such men as he, no using of his great powers to 
find place for himself by nursing the feeling of 
hatred and revenge in the breasts of proud and 
passionate races. There could be no crude, racial 
scorn, no theatrical pettiness, no vain, fatuous 
blindness, or puerile obstinacy. "Not painlessly 
had God remoulded and cast anew the nation." 
The pain had indeed smitten his soul, but his 
eyes were clear enough to see God's great hand 
in the movements of society and to realize the 
glory of new-birth out of pain, and his desire was 
aflame to be about the work that re-creates and 



sets in order. Like all sincere, unselfish men to 
whom life means helpfulness, he saw his task lying 
before him — like a sunlit road stretching straight 
before the traveler's feet. He was to walk in 
that path for all his remaining days. The qual- 
ity of his mind, the sum of his gifts and graces, 
the ideals of contemporary civilization suggested 
political preferment, but no consideration of self 
or fortune could swerve him from his course. 
There dwelt in him a leonine quality of combat 
and struggle, a delight of contest, a rising of all 
his powers to opposition that had only one mas- 
ter in his soul, and that master was the Christian 
instinct for service. I once heard him declare to 
an audience that it was the proudest duty of the 
South to accomplish the education of every child 
in its borders — high or low, bond or free, black 
or white. The only response to his appeal was 
silence. He shouted, "I will make you applaud 
that sentiment." With strident voice and shak- 
ing of the head, after the manner of the oratory 
of the olden time, he plead for human freedom. 
He pictured to his audience the ruin that may be 
wrought by hate, and the beauty of justice and 
sympathy until he awakened in them the god of 
justice and gentleness that lies sleeping in the 
human heart, and the applause rolled up to him 
in a storm. 

Over at Lexington, by the quiet flowing river, 
and the simple hills, Robert E. Lee saw the same 
vision, because there dwelt in him, too, the same 

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simplicity, sincerity and unselfishness. The philo- 
sophic student of our national story will one day 
appraise and relate how much it meant to that 
story that the vision of Lee was not disturbed nor 
distorted by dreams or fancies that in all ages have 
beset the brain of the hero of the people. This 
quiet man at Lexington had led mighty armies to 
victory, and had looked defeat and ruin in the 
face with epic fortitude. He had stood the 
supreme figure amid the fierce joys and shoutings 
of a mighty war. His name rang around the 
world foremost in the fellowship of the heroes of 
the English race ; but the vision that appeared to 
Lee, the conqueror and warrior, was the same 
that appeared to Curry, the scholar, and student 
and orator. It was a vision of many millions of 
childhood standing impoverished and untaught 
amid new duties, new occasions, new needs, new 
worlds of endeavor, appealing with outstretched 
hands to the grown-up strength of their genera- 
tion, to know why they should not have a country 
to love, an age to serve, a work to do, and a 
training for that work. Alien to this new gene- 
ration were the subtleties of divided sovereignty, 
or the responsibility for the presence of the Afri- 
can in our life, and strange to their eyes and ears 
the fading fires and retreating noises of battle 
and of war. The vision was life — unconquered, 
tumultuous, beautiful, wholesome, regenerative 
young life — asking a chance of its elders to live 
worthily in its world and time. The elders had 



had their day, and had had acquaintance with 
achievement and sadness and defeat, but here 
stood undefeated youth, coming on as comes on 
a fresh wave of the sea, with sunlight in its crest, 
to take the place of its fellow just dashed against 
the shore. " Life is greater than any theory ! 
We ask the right to live !" said this vision. And 
it touches my heart when I recall that I was of 
that appealing company. 

The Good Master once set a little child in the 
midst of His warring disciples and declared to 
them that that pathetic little figure prefigured to 
men forever the kingdom of heaven. Again and 
again in the long, dark story of the struggle of 
the race, that figure has appeared, and real great- 
ness of soul has never failed to catch the mean- 
ing of the radiant presence. We may be sure 
that it was present to William the Silent, and 
that the German has seen it in his dark hours, 
and the Frenchman and the Englishman, and the 
Greek and all the great races which have brought 
things to pass. Lee and Curry saw it, and 
thousands of like souls followed their leading and 
found their work and were happy as we are to-day 
with our work lying before us and our hearts 
asking no other blessedness. Let all Americans 
be grateful to the God of nations that He had us 
enough in His care to choose for us such leaders 
as these, " whose strength was as the strength 
of ten, because their hearts were pure." Lee 
gave his great example and a few years of noble 



service to the nation, and passed, like Arthur, 
" while the new sun arose upon a new day." A 
happier fortune befell Dr. Curry. There was left 
to him over two decades of time in which to 
strive for the realization of his dreams and the 
fulfillment of his plans. 

Our democracy, with its amazing record of 
achievement in the subduing of the continent, 
has nothing finer to show than the example of 
these two men in a time of great passion and 
headiness, save perhaps the example of another 
American. Away off in Massachusetts — that 
great commonwealth from which the nation has 
learned so much of order and moral persistence 
— a private citizen — George Peabody — was be- 
thinking himself of his country, bleeding from 
the red stripes of civil war, and wondering what 
he could do to heal its wounds. I hail him as 
the pioneer of that splendid army of "volunteer 
statesmen" who do not hesitate to undertake any 
work for their country's good. It did not matter 
to him that the states of the South had stood to 
him for four years as the enemy's country. His 
patriotism was not the patriotism of the Cossack, 
but the patriotism of the Christ. What he saw 
was youth which the nation needed for its health 
springing up untrained and sorely burdened — 
the sons of brave men, men who knew how to 
die for an idea, and who did not know how to 
compromise. What he did was to rise clearly 
above all small passions and to pour his great 



fortune into those stricken states for the benefit 
alike of the former master and of him who had 
been a slave. Lee, Peabody, Curry ! We will 
do well never to tire of mentioning their names ! 
An industrial democracy threatened constantly 
with vulgarity and coarse strength will have 
increasing need of the example of their noble 
calmness and patient idealism. 

The General Agency of the Peabody Board 
and later of the Slater Board, two of the noblest 
creative forces which have ever been set to work 
upon the life of the Republic, came to him as the 
opportunity of his life, and his last years were to 
be years of unfailing youth wherein he was able, 
in the service of these boards, to think clearly, to 
will resolutely, to work joyfully toward high, 
national ends. The task that confronted him, in 
its larger lines, was to democratize the point of 
view of an aristocratic society, to renationalize its 
impulses and aspirations, to preach the gospel of 
national unity to both sections, to stimulate the 
habit of community effort for public ends, to 
enrich the concept of civic virtue, to exemplify 
the ideal of social service to young men, and to 
set the public school, in its proper correlation to 
all other educational agencies, in the front of the 
public mind, as the chief concern of constructive 
statesmanship. His task, in its more technical 
aspects, was to reveal the public school as it 
should be, actually at work in a democratic so- 
ciety, with all of its necessities — trained and cul- 



tured teachers, varied curricula appealing to hand 
and eye and mind, industrial training, beautiful 
surroundings, nourished by public pride and 
strengthened by public confidence. The first ten 
years of his work were years of battle for the 
development of public opinion, and it was to be 
a great struggle, for many heresies were afield. 
He was told by those who sat in high places 
that public schools were godless, and that the 
state had no right to tax one man to educate an- 
other man's child; that it was dangerous to 
educate the masses, and that the educated negro 
or poor white meant a spoiled laborer, and many 
other musty things dear to the heart of the con- 
scientious doctrinaire. His reply to all this was: 
"Ignorance is no remedy for anything. If the 
state has a right to live at all, it has a right to 
educate. Education is a great national invest- 
ment." 

And so, that solemn, majestic thing, called 
public opinion, got born, and a few men as ear- 
nest as death became somehow what we call a 
movement, and the movement, led by this splen- 
did figure, wherein was blended the grace and 
charm of the old time with the vigor and freedom 
of the new, became a crusade, and young schol- 
ars had their imaginations touched by it and their 
creative instincts awakened by it, and the preach- 
ers saw their way clear to push it along, and the 
politicians, ever sensitive to the lightest wind of 
popular desire, felt its stirrings in the air. Above 

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it all, and energizing it all, stood this strong, 
gifted, earnest man — I had thought to say old 
man, but there never was any suggestion of age 
about Dr. Curry. Like the president of this 
Conference, he met youth on its own ground and 
asked no odds — impulse for impulse, strength for 
strength and heart for heart. I thank God that, 
as the things of sense faded from his sight, he 
saw that supremest good of life — an honest bit 
of creative work well done and bearing fruit. At 
the moment of the establishment of the Peabody 
Fund, it should be remembered that not a single 
Southern State had a system of free public 
schools. The angry gusts of war had blown out 
all the lights burning in their ancient seats of 
learning, save in the University of Virginia, 
Washington and Lee and a few other struggling 
colleges, which burned steadily on, giving light 
and heat to the darkness and coldness of the still 
land. The splendid system of private academies 
was being slowly re-established. Only in a few 
cities were to be found the semblance of a public 
school system. There were no normal or indus- 
trial schools. The Peabody Fund came into the 
field of helpfulness, and during a period of thirty 
years, under the wise administration of great 
American citizens, and directed by the energy 
and insight of Barnas Sears and J. L. M. Curry, 
expended, in stimulating ways, the sum of 
$2,478,527.13, No more impressive evidence 
of the influence of this fund and of the monu- 



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mental work of Curry and Sears can be found 
than in a plain recital of these facts : 

In every one of the Southern States to-day 
there is a public system of schools more or less 
complete. To bring this to pass a war-stricken 
region has expended one hundred and sixty-five 
millions of dollars. Normal and industrial 
schools for both races, sustained by general and 
local taxation, exist in every state. Thirty great 
institutions of higher learning have been revived 
and established. Five thousand Southern boys 
are studying technological subjects where ten 
studied them in 1873. Practically all cities or 
towns of three thousand population maintain a 
school system from which boys and girls may 
pass into college. The percentage of illiteracy 
for the white race in the twelve Southern States 
has been reduced from 25 per cent, to 12.5 per 
cent., and the colored race from 87 per cent, to 
47.5 per cent And greater than all this, a gen- 
erous and triumphant public sentiment has been 
aroused that will make these performances seem 
feeble in another decade. Can it be claimed that 
ever before in the history of the Republic so 
much good was accomplished as has been ac- 
complished by the expenditure of this $2,478,- 
527.13 plus the heart and brain of men like 
Curry and Sears and their colleagues and fol- 
lowers? I do not claim, of course, that all this 
wonderful achievement was due solely to these 
boards and to their agents. That would be ab- 

15 



surd. The efforts of these boards would have 
been farcical if they had not been projected upon 
the spirit of a self-reliant and unconquerable 
people. It was simply the meeting of a great 
idea with a great people and there followed a 
great result. 

The most impressive thing about Dr. Curry 
was his intense Americanism. One could not 
think of him as an Alabamian or a Virginian, but 
always as an American. He had believed in his 
youth in the theoretical ethics, at least, of Seces- 
sion. He did not change that belief in his old 
age. Calhoun was second only to Aristotle in 
this regard, and yet he was the most ardent 
American I have ever personally known. The 
flag stirred his highest eloquence, and our great 
unrended nation, with its dreams, its needs, its 
perils, its ideals appealed to him like nothing else 
on earth. In the summer of 1898, on July 4th, he 
was making the annual address before the Uni- 
versity of Chicago. At the same moment, in the 
waters about Santiago, American warships were 
thundering out the knell of Spanish rule on this 
continent. His subject on that occasion was the 
"Life and Character of John C. Calhoun." He 
was defending the constitutional orthodoxy of 
that great exponent of the compact theory of our 
government, with all the power and passion of 
his mind and heart. Every now and then a mes- 
senger boy would arrive with a telegram, and the 
proceedings would be interrupted to read the 

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announcement of the destruction of another Span- 
ish ship and to hear the outbursts of frantic, pa- 
triotic applause. Whereupon, Curry would turn 
to the American flag, draping the platform, and 
make it the basis of an appeal for unity and 
nationality, and then when the applause would 
die away, back again to Calhoun without a lost 
note. And so, the morning passed with Calhoun, 
Santiago and the American flag vividly entwined 
before the face of a Chicago audience. The inci- 
dent was something more than amusing or dra- 
matic, else I should not pause to relate it. An 
essential characteristic of the man stood revealed. 
His real genius and passion were for adaptability 
to environment, for sympathy with his time, for 
service on the side of its better forces. He had 
the grand manner and the social instincts of the 
aristocrat, but at bottom he was an individualist 
in the structure of his mind. Thomas Jefferson — 
that great spiritual force which the Lord God 
sent to this democracy that it might have fair 
trial, to teach it patience with common men and 
faith in their unfailing rectitude — claimed his 
deepest heart 

His was the first voice to declare that there was 
no place for a Helot in our system and that the 
negro must be trained properly for life in this 
nation. He was among the first to urge common 
sense as against sentimentality in the education 
of the negro. He denounced vehemently the 
proposition to divide taxes for educational pur- 

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poses, on the basis of race, as un-American, un- 
democratic, un-Christian, unwise. He • it was 
who first pointed out that the strategic point of 
the whole educational battle was the untaught 
white man and his child. He was the first to 
thunder out to colleges and universities that edu- 
cation was one whole thing, and that the colleges 
and universities must come out of their isolation, 
and, under the operation of the principle of 
noblesse oblige, lead the fight for the education of 
all the people. He sent home to our people 
their share of responsibility, and he also made 
the world know something of the courage and 
patience and self-reliance of the Southern struggle 
for self-realization, and he made the world believe 
that there was strength and purpose enough in 
this people to solve their own problems with 
justice and wisdom. In the discharge of all of 
these duties of the pioneer and the propagandist, 
no man in America, since Horace Mann, has 
shown such energy and enthusiasm as J. L. M. 
Curry. He had the genius for giving himself 
out, and the equipment of intellect and tempera- 
ment necessary for his many-sided duties. Before 
the legislatures of every state, from the Potomac 
to the Gulf, from college platforms, in great 
national gatherings, by country cross-roads, and 
in little villages wherein some impulse stirred a 
community to better its life, his voice was heard 
for twenty years. 

I saw him for the first time in 1883. A thriv- 

18 



ing North Carolina town was proposing to tax 
itself for adequate school facilities. This was 
not then an every day occurrence in North Caro- 
lina. Curry stood before them and plead with 
passion and power for the children of the com- 
munity. I remember how he seized a little child 
impulsively, and with dramatic instinct placed his 
hand upon his curly head, and pictured to the 
touched and silent throng the meaning of a little 
child to human society. It was the first time I 
had ever heard a man of such power spend him- 
self so passionately in such a cause. I had seen 
and heard men speak in that way about personal 
religion and heaven and hell, and struggles and 
wrongs long past, but never before about child- 
hood. It seemed to me, and to all young men 
who heard him, that here was a vital thing to 
work for, here indeed a cause to which a man 
might nobly attach himself, feeling sure that, 
though he himself might fail, the cause would go 
marching grandly on. 

And now what is the lesson of this sincere in- 
spiring life, for we are not here to mourn Dr. 
Curry or to recount in formal fashion the details 
of his life or to enumerate his specific achieve- 
ments, to catalogue the honors of his long life. 
I know of no happier life than Dr. Curry's. 
There is not an earnest man here who does not 
thrill at the thought of living such a life of work, 
and of making such an end of triumph. We do, 
indeed, sorrow in our deepest hearts, with her to 

19 



whom his daily presence meant strength and joy, 
and who was to him all this and more. We 
sorrow, too, with his son and his kindred. We 
do, indeed, miss him here and everywhere — we 
miss the tonic of his unconquerable youth, his 
noble mien and presence, the vibrant tone of his 
voice, the old-fashioned eloquence out of the 
heart, the garnered wisdom and experience, the 
sympathy, the vitality, the holiness of the man. 
My own heart has a sense of loneliness for the 
loss of him, for I loved him as men love one an- 
other, as the younger man sometimes loves the 
elder who has reached out to him warm, strong 
hands of sympathy, helping him thus to live 
loyally with his higher self, and who has stood 
to his sight an embodied ideal. "But we wage 
not any feud with death." It is the common- 
place of life. It is taught everywhere in nature 
and in literature, by the bright-winged ephemera 
that flutter about in the golden sunshine after the 
spring rains, and by the solemn imagery running 
through human writing wherein life is likened to 
the flying cloud, the stuff of dreams, the fleeing 
shadows and the vapor that vanisheth away. 
The strongest of us all shall shortly, as time 
runs, be otherwhere, even as our dead friend and 
leader, and the children playing in the fields shall 
stand in our places, doing the world's work. 
Matthew Arnold in "Dover Beach" calls his 
love to the window and bids her hear the grating 
roar of the pebbles on the shore, bringing to his 



mind, as to Sophocles long ago on the ^Egean, 
the eternal ebb and flow of human misery. They 
must love each other, he says pitifully, for the 
bright-seeming world lying before them has 
really neither light, nor hope, nor love, nor certi- 
tude, nor peace, nor help from pain. Such a life 
as Dr. Curry's, with its eager zest, its joyous 
desire to be at work, its perception of human 
dignity and worth, puts such pessimism out of 
thought and soul, and teaches that the high an- 
alogies and impulses of life come not from the 
moaning sea, but from the glad, renewing earth, 
and from undismayed, advancing life. 

The chief work then of this noble life was to 
develop an irresistible public opinion in a de- 
mocracy for the accomplishment of permanent 
public ends. In short, through such work as his 
in one generation of grim purpose and intellectual 
audacity, the South has lost its economic dis- 
tinctness and has become a part of American life 
and American destiny, and the North has learned 
to love, I trust, its brothers whom it did not 
know and, therefore, could not understand. Men 
may forget the oratory, the diplomacy, the intel- 
lectual vigor, the gracious, compelling charm of 
Curry the man, but they will not forget the zeal, 
the self-surrender of Curry the social reformer 
and civic patriot; and when the final roll shall be 
called of the great sons of the South, and of the 
nation, who served society well when service was 
most needed, I believe that no answer will ring 



out clearer and higher and sweeter in that larger 
air than the Adsum of J. L. M. Curry. I trust 
that the State of Alabama, whose citizenship he 
adorned, may have wisdom enough to reserve 
one of its niches in the national capitol for a 
statue of this man, not only in recognition of his 
great services, but to emphasize the fact that a 
man may be a statesman or a hero, as well by 
service to childhood and ideals of training, as by 
subtlety in constitutional argument or bold cour- 
age in war. His work has been accomplished, 
and has been handed on to the living, and he has 
gone. His fame is secure, for it is the persistent 
fame of the teacher and reformer. 

Marcus Aurelius in his tent on the Danube 
tells how he learned discipline from Rusticus, and 
kindness from Sextus, and patience from Alexan- 
der, mentioning one by one his old teachers, and 
their names glow there forever beside their 
pupil's — the pure pagan — shining like stars in 
that heathen night. In such ways does the 
teacher live on through generations, teaching in 
death as in life. Is it not the task of the living 
to take this public opinion, now ductile and sha- 
pable, and fashion it into scientific, active forces, 
and realize it in ever greater and more enduring 
institutions and agencies for the betterment of 
man ? Is it not our task, gaining strength from 
the example of this dead leader of ours, to press 
forward with patience and quiet resolve, not to 
be deterred, not to be made afraid, not to despair, 



not to listen to any voices save those voices with- 
in us, which tell us that such work cannot die ? 
Surely this work we are in is the nation's work, 
and this nation is a great spiritual and moral 
adventure worth living for and working for, as 
well as dying for. 

Earnest, simple men, like him of whom we 
have spoken, have hallowed its past by upright 
living and patriotic purpose. Strong, stout souls 
hear the call to battle for the integrity of its 
present life, and hints and prophecies of its wide 
and liberal future sing in the hearts of the long, 
bright line of invincible youth to whose freedom 
we stand pledged, even as there stood pledged 
to us, the high-statured men of the olden time. 



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